The Zookeeper's Wife (**)

Traditionally Holocaust-themed movies do well, both critically and critically (yes, I know). It's a cookie-cutter story of good versus evil, and the image of Nazis murdering innocent Jews will never be something that can be erased from history. With recent films like Denial last year and now this Jessica Chastain vehicle, the genre seems to have slipped from stories with passion to churned out movies riddled with cliches.

It's 1939 Poland and we find ourselves in a picturesque Warsaw zoo. The owners Antonina (Chastain) and her husband Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) ride bikes around the grounds, checking in on their camels, lions, tigers, and bears. Oh my! Can you guess what happens next? The city is bombed with the arrival of the Nazis and the country is soon conquered by Hitler's forces. The zookeepers stay to tend to the animals, but in typical Nazi fashion, they come through the zoo with guns and shoot down most of the creatures with the thrill and happiness you might see with folks in an arcade. The husband and wife duo hear about the Jews being rounded up into the ghettos, and concoct a plan to start a pig farm as a ploy to hide Jews in their home. A pig farm allows them to stay in the zoo, raise pigs to feed Nazi troops, and allows access to the ghettos for feed (rounding up garbage and slop from the trashcans provided ample nutrition).

There are a couple interesting aspects of the film, the first being that Antonina and Jan are not Jews nor are they ever under threat of persecution. They walk around the ravaged town freely to see the utter destruction, converse with Nazi officers, even invite some of them over for dinner. This allows us to see a completely shocking scene (the one memorable moment in the film for me) in which Jan rushes to the trains to Auschwitz in attempt to save anyone else he can. An elderly Jewish man who watches over a group of children tells Jan that rescue would be futile, that it wouldn't work. The Jewish children all around them are innocent to the fact of the matter, blind to the horrors of the situation. "Don't stir up fear," he says. Instead of saving any children, Jan instead lifts these boys and girls up into the cattle car, essentially sending them to their doom, unable to help.

The rest of the film is cookie-cutter in the way we get to know the hiding Jews, how they hold their mouthes in hiding when Nazi's come by to visit (of course one of the children makes a peep - what will happen next??), how the war ends and it's all smiles and rainbows. It's nothing we haven't seen before, and the story chooses to play it safe instead of showing the actual horrors of genocide. If you're going to tell a Holocaust story, don't shy away from the truth. If you're going to limit content to retain a PG-13 rating, maybe this isn't a story that needs to be told. I'm not saying the movie requires endless scenes of gore and murder, but to normalize a story by making such a forgettable movie does nothing to honor the memory of the actual heroes and victims of the time.